Associate software engineer Jobs in Seattle, WA

Do you want to build the infrastructure that every AWS service depends on before it can start? The AWS Secrets Management team builds and operates the system that distributes credentials and certificates to AWS's internal service fleet. The system sits on the critical path for service startup, runs across every host in the fleet, and has zero tolerance for downtime. As a Software Development Engineer on this team, you will design and deliver backend services, APIs, and the host agent that powers credential distribution at massive scale. You will also lead migrations that modernize how credentials are stored and delivered, build AI-agent-driven operational tooling, and help bring the system up in new AWS regions. If you are a self-starter who thrives on solving hard distributed-systems problems with real, immediate impact, this is the role for you.

Key job responsibilities
- Design and implement production backend services, APIs, and host-level agents in Java, Rust, C++, and Python that distribute credentials and certificates across AWS's internal fleet with high availability and zero downtime.
- Own end-to-end migrations of live, heavily depended-upon systems, preserving backwards compatibility while modernizing how credentials are stored and delivered.
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, automated test coverage, and AI-assisted operational tooling — including agentic coding tools for triage and remediation — to keep a fleet-wide system operable at scale.
- Collaborate with security partner teams, product managers, and principal engineers on cross-team designs, participating in written design reviews and code reviews to ensure solutions meet security and reliability requirements.
- Drive operational excellence through metrics, alarms, incident response, and on-call rotations, identifying root causes and implementing permanent fixes to reduce operational burden over time.

A day in the life
Most of your time is heads-down: writing code, reviewing designs, and working through complex migration plans for systems that thousands of other services depend on. Collaboration is concentrated at key moments — design reviews where you present your approach, code reviews where you give and receive candid feedback, and incident response where your deep knowledge of the system makes you the person others turn to. You use AI-assisted engineering tools daily, both for coding and for operational triage, applying your judgment on when to trust their output.

About the team
The AWS Secrets Management team is responsible for credential and certificate distribution across AWS's internal service fleet. Our system is a dependency for a large number of AWS and Amazon services, which means the work we do is upstream of other teams' launches, migrations, and security commitments. We operate in an inclusive environment that values knowledge sharing and mentorship. Engineers each own an area of the system outright — serving as the required reviewer, the go-to person during incidents, and the one who sets its technical direction. We are focused on modernizing credential delivery and expanding into new AWS regions, and we are looking for engineers who are excited to shape that future.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
- 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
- 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- 3+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

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